Back in Beijing and flight home

Got back to Beijing, went to ultimate pickup, started catching up with
old friends, buying things I needed to bring back, shipping things
home, etc.

My friend Jeff Mandell invited me to go camping on the Great Wall with
him and his friend Mike. My friend Laura was at dinner with us so he
invited her too. She had class the next day, and he kept telling her
"you're going right?" so she caved in. We took the bus out there, ate
lunch, were told by the locals that you weren't allowed to walk on the
wall. This was an area which really had nobody, just some locals with
a restaurant waiting for relatively non existent tourists to come. But
there were some. We had to bribe a guy in one of the towers 20 RMB per
person to let us go through. He saw our sleeping pads and said, "I
know you're type".

So we hiked a ways on the restored part of the wall and got to an
unrestored part. It was pretty cool, its got trees and bushes growing
all over it. We found a decent tower with some dirt and grass outside
of it to camp at. We ate dinner, but as we finished, a storm moved in
and it got windy. We moved into the tower. It was extremely windy in
the tower due to the wind tunnel effect. So we stacked up rocks and
layed out sleeping pads and went to sleep. I had my own sleeping bag
so I slept well, the others complained of cold. In the morning the
weather was great since the storm blew the haze and pollution away. We
ventured further along the wall where it literally climbed at an 85
degree angle up a rock face. It was almost pure climbing. Good times.

So next on the list was the Shanghai tournament. I rode the train down
and arrived Friday morning. Some guys went for a massage, one went to
a market. I went to the Mag Lev train and rode it out to the airport
and back. Only 80 RMB, $10 US. Its a 7 minute trip each way, top speed
of 430 km/hr. It was great.

The first day of the tournament we went 4-0. Our team was awesome, we
picked up some awesome players due to luck and family connections and
the right Beijingers being in town at the right time. My friend Jiew
from Bangkok came and brought this Thai girl Lee Beller and her
husband Dave, he's a semi old veteran from Ohio.
We played Shanghai B, Manila, an international team and Shanghai A.
The highlight was beating Shanghai A. We would make a great play, then
they would make a great play, then we would answer right back. It was
a good game, and it pissed them off.

Everyone else had at least 1 loss the first day, Shanghai A had 2.
However our perfect record did not seem to be enough for them to rank
us 1st for bracket play on sunday. In reality, Shanghai realized if
they did it correctly, they would have to play us before the finals,
so the rearranged the bracket in their favor so we would play harder
Singapore in the semis. We couldn't match up against Singapore's 6'
10" monster and handlers who could put it to him well. Then Singapore
lost to Shanghai A in the finals, which was sort of a non climactic
and depressing finish for us, but what are you gonna do now?

Back in Beijing I met up with some more friends, and finalized
everything. My language partner brought some friends with her, one of
which was very attractive. I wished I had met her back in the fall,
but she said she has a boyfriend. She said if she's ever in the market
she will email me though.

One girl from ultimate also departed Beijing on the same day as me so
some ultimate folk got together for hot pot. I was criticized for
planning my flight home on a Thursday, because I would miss out on a
Friday party. Another guy is leaving on Saturday, so I said it was a
rookie move on my part.

The next day, Laura and Wang Ran rode the bus with me to the airport.
They gave me a coffee mug with some pictures on it. One was a baby
picture of me that I had given them when they saw it on my computer.
There were some other pictures of us together, and when I opened it,
both of them had to turn around and leave the room because they got
emotional. I was touched.

So I will miss Beijing and China, I have tons of friends there, and
life is easy. But I didn't feel too emotional at all, just sort of
excited to come back, to what will be a new sort of life, at least for
a bit. I've left places and friends a bunch of times on this trip so
maybe I'm just a veteran.

The flight wasn't that bad. I bought "Prison Break", the DVD series, 5
minutes before we got on the bus to the airport. I had seen the first
few episodes and got addicted. So me and this 20 year old girl from
Bucknell doing a month long study in China watched it for half the
flight on my laptop until the battery died. Then I went to sleep, woke
up to breakfast and us landing soon.

Now I'm chilling in Vancouver. What a great city to be welcomed back
to North America by. The approach was great, the harbor and the
mountainous islands with low clouds and great sun and blue skies was
great. The air here is great, I can breath. The city is very clean,
its small, and obviously doesn't have 12 million people like Beijing.
But there are still tons of Asians! Its kind of funny, I thought I
just left Asia. There is a huge population here.

I get on a flight to Montreal in a few hours, arrive tomorrow morning
and hop over to DC.

Yangshuo pt 2

I split up from the Norwegians in Xi An. They went to Beijing and
returned to Yangshuo. They were planning on going there for their last
stop, so I just went straight there. It was raining cats and dogs. I
walked down the street and saw A Jia, the climbing guide, walk out of
Karst Cafe and see me walking up from 20 yards away and he was like
"what?". So yeah, people were happy to see me, we went climbing etc.

Things hadn't really changed, one night there was some excitement when
3 drunk big Europeans started a fight at a bar with some Chinese
people. This one huge Dutch guy ended up getting hit in the face with
a chair, not too bad though. Completely his fault because they left
the bar and the situation was resolved, but he came back 5 minutes
later with that shoulder swinging walk that says I mean business. But
the Chinese vastly outnumbered them like they tend to do in the world
so they were kicked out. The Europeans continued to gloat at Karst
Cafe where we were hanging out and it was annoying.

I celebrated my birthday with the Norwegians, 2 Mexicans that I met
there, and this Chinese female teacher from the Wisdom Girls' English
school. She brought me a sweet birthday cake shaped like a Tiger,
since I'm born in the year of the Tiger. So that was a fun night.

One day while buying cheap outdoor camping gear at a going out of
business sale, 3 girls invited me to go camping with them and
ChinaClimb. ChinaClimb is the foreigner run climbing outfit. Most of
their staff had gone to Beijing for some event, so the boss was like,
close the shop, we're going camping. I was actually in the China Climb
office being shown climbing shoes, and he walked in and said, "are you
going on our rainy trek too?". So I decided it would be fun. We were
going in search of some huge cave that also had this big arch that
connected to mountains. Hard to explain. One of their friends had been
there years before, but no one knew exactly how to get there. So I
decided to go, and next morning we left. We rode minibuses there, and
actually found it. We had to walk a ways and cross a few rivers, which
was fun. I had to carry some girls across because they didn't want to
soak their shoes and I had Tevas. I did that until the boss was like,
"let them do it themselves, they all want to be climbing guides, and
to do that, they have to learn that sometimes you have to get your
feet wet."

So camping was fun, really muddy, we climbed up some extremely steep
slopes with loose rocks which was good times. I didnt take my camera,
so we'll see if I can get any pictures from them.

I came back and flew back to Beijing on Saturday morning. I decided to
drop the extra dough on a plane ticket since it would give me some
extra time.